Asked about the strike that killed him, a senior adviser to the
president's campaign suggests he should've "had a more
responsible father."
October 26, 2012 "The
Atlantic" - -Cornered by reporters with video cameras, former White House
Press Secretary Robert Gibbs, a senior adviser to President
Obama's reelection campaign, attempted to defend the kill list
that the Obama Administration uses to determine whose body
should next be blown apart. American drone strikes have resulted
in hundreds of dead innocents in the last four years, even as
the program has killed a number of high-level al Qaeda
terrorists. There are two remarkable things about the ensuing
exchange, which eventually turns into a discussion about a dead
16-year-old kid:

First, it's vital for the uninitiated to understand how Team
Obama misleads when it talks about its drone program. Asked how
their kill list can be justified, Gibbs replies that "When there
are people who are trying to harm us, and have pledged to
bring terror to these shores, we've taken that fight to
them." Since the kill list itself is secret, there's no way to
offer a specific counterexample. But we do know that U.S. drones
are targeting people who've never pledged to carry out attacks
in the United States. Take Pakistan, where the CIA kills some
people without even knowing their identities. "As Obama nears
the end of his term, officials said the kill list in Pakistan
has slipped to fewer than 10 al-Qaeda targets, down from as many
as two dozen," the Washington Post
reports. "The agency now aims many of its Predator strikes
at the Haqqani network, which has been blamed for attacks on
U.S. forces in Afghanistan." The vast majority would never make
their way to New York or Washington, D.C., and the Obama
Administration would never agree to rules that permitted only
the killing of threats to "the homeland."

The second notable statement concerns the killing of 16-year-old
American citizen Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

He was
the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America,
who was also an American citizen, and who was killed by
drone two weeks before his son was, along with another
American citizen named Samir Khan. Of course, both Anwar al-Awlaki
and Samir Khan were, at the very least, traitors to their
country -- they had both gone to Yemen and taken up with Al
Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and al-Awlaki had proven
himself an expert inciter of those with murderous designs
against America and Americans: the rare man of words who
could be said to have a body count. When he was killed, on
September 30, 2011, President Obama
made a speech about it; a few months later, when the
Obama administraton's public-relations campaign about its
embrace of what has come to be called "targeted killing"
reached its climax in
a front-page story in the New York Times that
presented the President of the United States as the last
word in deciding who lives and who dies, he was quoted as
saying that the decision to put Anwar al-Awlaki on the kill
list -- and then to kill him -- was "an easy one." But
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki wasn't on an American kill list.

Nor was he a member of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninusla.
Nor was he "an inspiration," as his father styled himself,
for those determined to draw American blood; nor had he gone
"operational," as American authorities said his father had,
in drawing up plots against Americans and American
interests. He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two
years, since his father had gone into hiding. He was a boy
who knew his father was on an American kill list and who
snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of
September 4, 2011, to try to find him. He was a boy who was
still searching for his father when his father was killed,
and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying
goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on
his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among
boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire
along the side of a road when an American drone came out of
the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

How does Team Obama
justify killing him?

The answer Gibbs gave is chilling:

ADAMSON: ...It's
an American citizen that is being targeted without due
process, without trial. And, he's underage. He's a
minor.

GIBBS: I would suggest that you should have a far more
responsible father if they are truly concerned about the
well being of their children. I don't think becoming an
al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about
doing your business.

Again, note that this
kid wasn't killed in the same drone strike as his father. He
was hit by a drone strike elsewhere, and by the time he was
killed, his father had already been dead for two weeks.
Gibbs nevertheless defends the strike, not by arguing that
the kid was a threat, or that killing him was an accident,
but by saying that his late father irresponsibly joined al
Qaeda terrorists. Killing an American citizen without due
process on that logic ought to be grounds for impeachment.
Is that the real answer? Or would the Obama Administration
like to clarify its reasoning? Any Congress that respected
its oversight responsibilities would get to the bottom of
this.

Conor
Friedersdorf is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he focuses
on politics and national affairs. He lives in Venice,
California, and is the founding editor of
The Best of
Journalism, a newsletter devoted to exceptional nonfiction.

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